Monica Prado transforms porcelain into intricate botanical sculptures shaped by an enduring fascination with the natural world. Her relationship with ceramics began in 1979, when she encountered Indigenous ceramic traditions while working with a relief team in Guatemala, an experience that established a lasting connection with clay and handmade processes. Today, she works exclusively with porcelain, using hand-building techniques to develop delicate structures with pronounced detail, texture, and movement.
The physical demands of porcelain are central to Prado’s practice. Each element is sculpted by hand, and her most elaborate pieces can require months of work, with the process depending on patience, precision, and countless small adjustments. Colorful glazes and gold luster add another layer to the porcelain, producing contrasts between matte or saturated surfaces and areas of metallic brilliance. Rather than treating botanical forms as fixed representations, Prado builds compositions through relationships among shapes, colors, textures, and rhythms, translating her emotional responses to nature into carefully constructed ceramic forms.
Prado’s ceramics are rooted in an attempt to preserve sensations associated with encounters with nature. She has described beginning with feelings connected to sunlight, gardens, seasonal abundance, and fleeting moments, then allowing those impressions to develop through the physical process of shaping clay. This approach gives her botanical sculptures a tension between fragility and permanence: porcelain can be delicate, yet the fired material preserves forms that would otherwise change or disappear. Her practice consequently connects meticulous craftsmanship with an expansive celebration of natural diversity, turning transient impressions into enduring sculptural compositions.
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